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29/9/2011

Southern Panoramas

SESC Belenzinho, Sao Paulo

curated by Solange Farkas

Contemporary artistic production from the geopolitical south and the work of the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson are the focal points of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, scheduled to open on September 30 in three separate cultural venues across São Paulo.

Akram Zaatari, Gregg Smith, Marcello Mercado, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Shaun Gladwell, Galina Myznikova & Sergey Provorov, Cinthia Marcelle, Eder Santos, Marcellvs L. and Tatiana Blass are among the 98 artists selected for the Southern Panoramas show, which will map the recent artistic production in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The exhibition Your body of work, Olafur Eliasson’s first solo exhibition in Latin America, consists of ten site-specific installations that dialogue with the city and the architecture of the Festival’s three venues: SESC Belenzinho, SESC Pompeia and Pinacoteca do Estado.

The 17th edition marks the transformation of Videobrasil, originally dedicated to video production, into the only contemporary art festival of its kind in Brazil. “Videobrasil is not opening up to all forms of artistic manifestation on a whim; the move results from a process that has accompanied a change in the role of the audiovisual languages in contemporary production”, explains the general curator Solange Farkas.
The choice of Eliasson as guest artist underscores this change. “The particularity of Eliasson is that he works with issues derived from science, from cinema, from technology in a manner that rejects any limitation in terms of language and that imposes itself as sensory experience.”
With 130 guests, including artists, curators and researchers, and exhibitions that will remain open through to January 2012, the Festival offers an intense educational program designed to discuss different aspects of southern circuit production and deepen the debate on artistic residencies and the role they play in diluting frontiers on the current scene. The 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil is a joint production by SESC (www.sescsp.org.br) and Associação Cultural Videobrasil (www.videobrasil.org.br).

Southern Panoramas: a pivotal role for other circuits
Featuring video, performances, installations, objects, publications, paintings, photography and other artistic forms, Southern Panoramas aims to create a key role for artistic output from various regions throughout the geopolitical south.
The 98 participants include well-known names on the international circuit – such as the Lebanese Akram Zaatari, the Australian Shaun Gladwell and the Argentinean Marcello Mercado – and others only beginning to exhibit internationally, such as the Italo-Chilean Gianfranco Foschino (Chile), featured this year at the IILA Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
This edition’s participants were chosen from 1,295 submissions, the largest number ever received by the Festival. The presence of artists from the geopolitical south also increased, particularly from Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
“The number of submissions has grown with each edition”, says Solange Farkas. “What is most extraordinary is the growth in languages and the representation of regions from the South, which really allows us to draw a panorama of contemporary production across the axis”.
Diverse in terms of strategies and languages, these works remain close to the major issues of the contemporary world, with a range of concerns not limited to the field of the visual arts. Transit is one theme that recurs throughout these works, as is a questioning about nature and architecture and devices capable of mapping emotions and conducting an inventory of memory.
Southern Panoramas includes four works specially commissioned for the Festival through the Videobrasil Open Atelier Prize. The award, conferred on winning projects, benefits young São Paulo-based artists. These works are currently being developed at Casa Tomada, a space geared towards artistic production, reflection and interaction under the orientation of artists, curators and researchers in the Brazilian visual arts.

Prizes and Residencies
The Southern Panoramas exhibition carries R$45 thousand in prize-money awarded by an international jury. In addition to the cash prize, the jury also works in partnership with representatives of the artistic residency network associated with Videobrasil to confer eight residency prizes in Brazil, Holland, France, Mauritius and Bolivia.
The residencies will be hosted at Vrije Academie voor Werkplaats Beeldende Kunsten de Haia; Videoformes, in Clermont-Ferrand; pARTage, Muritius Islands; Galería Kiosko, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra; the Instituto Sacatar, Ilha de Itaparica, Bahia; and Edifício Lutetia, home to the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado residency in São Paulo. In addition to these institutions, other partners are the Prince Claus Fund (Holland), the Spanish Cultural Center in São Paulo, the Spanish Agency for International Developent Cooperation (AECID), the Consulate General of France in São Paulo and French Alliance.
On the Festival jury panel are the Brazilian critic Rodrigo Moura, curator of Instituto Inhotim; the Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, who directs the Center for Contemporary Art Lagos; the Spanish curator Agustín Pérez Rubio, director of MUSAC, in Castilla y León; the Argentinean Gabriela Salgado, holder of a master’s degree in contemporary curatorship from the Royal College of Art, London; and the Bolivian artist Raquel Schwartz.
The 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil trophy was created by the Brazilian artist Tunga, known on the international scene for his participations in the Venice Biennale (1982) and at the Kassel Documenta (1997), among other exhibitions. Tunga’s trophy is a hybrid of sculpture and camera device.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil
Associação Cultural Videobrasil is an international center of reference for contemporary artistic production in the geopolitical south. Created by the curator Solange Oliveira Farkas, former chief-curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, the association maintains a productive partnership with SESC, a Brazilian institution geared towards nurturing culture. Together, the organizations have produced such exhibitions as Joseph Beuys – A revolução somos nós (São Paulo and Salvador, 2010/11) and Sophie Calle – Cuide de você (São Paulo and Salvador, 2009).
Other fruits of this ongoing ACV-SESC partnership are the Videobrasil Residencies Program, which selects artists for interchanges with partner institutions in Brazil and abroad; the Videobrasil Authors’ Collection, a series of documentaries about prominent artists; Caderno SESC_Videobrasil, an annual publication on contemporary art; and FF>>Dossier, a series of on-line artist profiles.

SESC
Created by businesspeople from the Brazilian Commercial and Services association some 60 years ago, SESC – Commercial Social Service bases its undertakings on a solid cultural and educational program with emphasis on social innovation and transformation.
During the 1980s, SESC pioneered new models of cultural action and highlighted the importance of education as a platform for social transformation. The concretization of this premise came as the result of hard work in the cultural field, in all its varied manifestations and for all possible publics, across different age groups and social strata.
In the State of São Paulo, SESC has a network of 32 units, most of which are cultural and sports centers. The entity also offers social tourism activities and programs focused on health, environmental education and digital inclusion, as well as special programs for children and the elderly.

Image: Cinthia Marcelle (Brasil, 1974), Cruzada 2010, videoinstalação. © Cortesia da artista, Box4 e Galeria Vermelho

contact
Décio Hernandez Di Giorgi
(+55 11) 3589 6212 (+55 11) 8255 3338 dgiorgi@uol.com.br
Teté Martinho
(+55 11) 9901 0375 (+55 11) 3645 0516 tetemartinho@videobrasil.org.br
Marcio Junji Sono
(+55 11) 3645 0516 (+55 11) 8417 6333 marcio@videobrasil.org.br

Opening: Friday Sept. 30
9:00 p.m.
Southern Panoramas
Olafur Eliasson – Your Body of Work
SESC Belenzinho
9:00 p.m. | Performances
Bandeira de água benta/bandeira de água comum (Deyson Gilbert)
Ponto de fuga (Felipe Bittencourt)
Corpo ruído #4 – Estudo para um soterramento (Paula Garcia)
SESC Belenzinho

SESC Belenzinho
Rua Padre Adelino, 1000 | Metrô Belém | Cep 03303-000 - São Paulo - SP
Tuesday – Saturday: 9:00 – 22:00 | Sunday and holidays: 9:00 – 20:00
Free admission

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